The autumn leaves are falling like rain. Although my neighbors are all barbarians and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups at my table.

T’ang Dynasty poem

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

~ Wu-men ~

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Bruce Lee and the Early Martial Arts Culture of San Francisco

The Dao of Strategy sent me a link to this entry at Fightland Blog. The original post contains a LOT of great old pictures and and overview of the Chinese martial arts culture in San Francisco at the time Bruce Lee arrived and began teaching.

Photos of Bruce Lee and the Early Martial Arts Culture of San Francisco Bay

Charles Russo is a San Francisco journalist and contributor to Fightland. His new book Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in Americachronicles
the formative days of a young (pre-Hollywood) Bruce Lee as he navigates
the heated martial arts proving ground of the San Francisco Bay Area in
the early 1960s. The historical photographs featured here (and in the
book) reflect the robust fight culture that Bruce encountered, which ran
the gamut from Chinatown Tong enforcers to Oakland street fighters.
Regarded by the Chinatown masters as little more than "a dissident with
bad manners," Bruce's time amid this culture would be both turbulent and
formative, involving his legendary high noon showdown with Wong Jack
Man as well as his earliest formal constructions of Jeet Kune Do.

In the post-World War II era, the San Francisco Bay Area became one of
the great melting pots of martial arts culture in the west. In San
Francisco's Chinatown this culture anchored around Lau Bun, the Choy Li
Fut kung fu master and local tong enforcer who opened one of the very
first Chinese martial arts schools in America.
In the summer of 1959, a hotheaded 18-year-old Bruce Lee would have a little-known run-in with this group.

The altar within Sil Lum kung fu master TY Wong's school bore the
inscription: "The proper use of the good long fist / Is to punish
lawbreakers and to eliminate violence." TY belonged to the same tong as
his senior colleague Lau Bun, and played a similar role within the
community. When U.S. servicemen on shore leave took to Chinatown's
Forbidden City nightclubs, it often fell to TY to curb the rowdier forms
of behavior.

Although Bruce was born in San Francisco's Chinatown, he was often at
odds with members of the neighborhood's martial arts culture. In fact,
one longstanding Chinatown master dismissed him as little more than "a
dissident with bad manners." Bruce instead found a more likeminded crowd
across the Bay, in the city of Oakland.

A menacing street fighter in his youth, James Lee embodied all of the
blue collar grit of his native Oakland. Beyond his physicality, James
was also a brilliant innovator of the martial arts in America. He ran a
modern school out of his garage, invented and built his own training
equipment, and even started his own publishing company. (In fact, James
Lee is the reason why the English vernacular uses "Kung Fu" instead of
"Gung Fu.") James embodied the sort of martial arts future that a young
Bruce Lee was envisioning. Despite their difference in age, they would
develop a close fraternal bond that lasted the rest of their lives.

One of Bruce Lee's closest colleagues in Oakland was Wally Jay,
the Hawaiian jujitsu master who had been teaching in the East Bay since
the early 1950s. Wally was just one of several colleagues Bruce found in
Oakland that had ties back the dynamic (and often-forgotten) melting
pot martial arts culture of Hawaii during the mid-20th Century. Wally's
teacher (left) was Seishiro Okazaki, who had emerged from a long line of
samurai to be a pioneering and highly innovative figure within the
early martial arts culture of the West.

Kenpo practitioners Ed Parker and Ralph Castro were key
collaborators that Bruce Lee discovered in Oakland, who also had ties
back to the robust martial arts culture of Hawaii.

Ed Parker was a visionary for martial arts culture in America. Parker
had studied kenpo in his native Hawaii before opening his first school
in Pasadena around 1956, where he elicited considerable interest from
the Hollywood crowd. Beginning in 1964, Parker's Long Beach
International Karate Tournament would be a cornerstone of martial arts
culture in America, bringing together a wide range of practitioners from
around the world each year. The inaugural Long Beach event in '64 got
Bruce Lee noticed by Hollywood, and resulted in him being cast as Kato
on the Green Hornet shortly after.